Harper's Weekly/The Latest Thing

by John Galsworthy

 

The Latest Thing

By JOHN GALSWORTHY

THERE was in her blood that which bade her hasten lest there should be something still new to her when she died. Death! She was continually haunted by the fear lest that itself might be new. And she would say: "Do you know what it feels like to be dead?—I do." If she had not known this she felt that she would not have lived her life to the full. And one must live one's life to the full. Indeed, yes! One must experience everything. In her relations with men, for instance, there was nothing, so far us she could see, to prevent her from being a good wife, good mother, good mistress, and good friend—to different men all at the same time, and even to more than one man of each kind, if necessary. One had merely to be oneself, a full nature, fully expressed. Greed was a low and contemptible attribute, especially in women—a woman wanted nothing more than everything, and the best of that. And it was intolerable if one could not have that little. Women had always been kept down. Not to be kept down was still, on the whole, new. Yet sometimes, after she had not been kept down rather violently, she would feel: Oh! the weariness! I shall throw it all up and live on a shilling a day, like a sweated worker—that at all events will be new! She even sometimes dreamed of retirement to convent life—the freshness of its old-world novelty appealed to her.

To such an idealist the very colors of the rainbow did not suffice, nor all the breeds of birds there were; and her life was piled with cages. Here she had them one by one, borrowed their songs, relieved them of their plumes; then, finding that they no longer had any, let them go, for to look at things without possessing them was intolerable, but to keep them when she had got them even more so.

She often wondered how people could get along at all whose natures were not so full as hers. Life, she thought, must be so dull for the poor creatures, only doing one thing at a time, and that time so long. What with her painting and her music, her dancing, her flying, her motoring, her writing of novels, and poems, her love-making, maternal cares, entertaining friendships, housekeeping, wifely duties, political and social interests, her gardening. talking, acting, her interest in Russian linen and the Woman's movement; what with traveling in new countries, listening to new preachers, lunching new novelists, discovering new dancers, taking lessons in Spanish; what with new dishes for dinner, new religions, new dogs, new dresses, new duties to new neighbors, and newer charities—life was so full that the moment it stood still and was simply old "Life," it seemed to be no life at all.

She could not bear the amateur; feeling within herself some sacred fire that made her "an artist" whatever she took up—or dropped. She had a particular dislike, too, of machine-made articles, for her, personality must be deep-woven into everything; look at flowers, how wonderful they were in that way, growing quietly to perfection, each in its corner, and inviting butterflies to sip their dew! She knew, for she had been told it so often, that she was the crown of creation—the latest thing in women, who were, of course, the latest thing in creatures. There had never, till quite recently, been a woman like her, so awfully interested in so many things, so likely to be interested in so many more. She had flung open all the doors of Life, and was so continually going out and coming in, that Life had some considerable difficulty in catching a glimpse of her at all. Just as the cinematograph was the future of the theater, so was she the future of women, and in the words of the poet "prou' title." To sip at every flower before her wings closed; if necessary to make new flowers to sip at. To smoke the whole box of cigarettes straight off, and in the last puff of smoke expire! And withal no feverishness, only a certain reposeful and womanly febrility; a mere perpetual glancing from quick-sliding eyes, to see the next move, to catch the new movement—God bless it! And, mind you, a high sense of duty—perhaps a higher sense of duty than that of any woman who had gone before; a deep and intimate conviction that women had an immensity of leeway to make up, that their old starved, stunted lives must be avenged, and that right soon. To enlarge the horizon—this was the sacred duty! No mere Boccaccian or Louis Quinze cult of pleasurable sensations; no crude lolling plutocratic dollery of a spoiled dame. No! the full deep river of sensations nibbling each others' tails. Life was real, life was earnest, and Time the essence of its contract.

To say that she had favorite books, plays, men, dogs, colors, was to do her but momentary justice. A deeper Equity assigned her only one favorite—the next: and for the sake of that one favorite, no Catherine, no Semiramis, or Messalina could more swiftly dispose of all the others. With what avidity she sprang into its arms, drained its lips of kisses, looking hurriedly the while for its successor; for God alone she felt—knew what would happen to her if she finished drinking before she caught sight of that next, necessary one.

AND yet, now and again Time played her false, and she got through too soon. It was then that she realized the sensation of death. After the first terrible inanition, those moments lived without "living" would begin to assume a sort of preciousness, to acquire holy sensations of their own. "I am dead," she would say to herself; "I really am dead; I lie motionless; hearing, feeling, smelling, seeing, thinking nothing. I lie impalpable—yes, that is the word—completely impalpable; above me I can see the vast blue blue, and all around me the vast brown brown—it is something like what I remember of Egypt. And there is a kind of singing in my ears, that are really not ears now; a gray, thin sound, like—ah!—Maeterlinck, and a very faint honey smell like—er—Omar Khayyam. And I just move as a blade of grass moves in the wind. Yes, I am dead. It feels exactly like it." And a new exhilaration would seize her, for she felt that, in that sensation of death, she was living! At lunch, or it might be dinner, she would tell her newest man exactly what it felt like to be dead. "It's not really disagreeable," she would say; "it has its own flavor. You know, like Turkish coffee, just a touch of india-rubber in it—I mean the coffee." And the new one would sneeze, and answer: "Yes, I know a little what you mean: asphodels, too—you get it in Greece. My only difficulty is that if you are dead, you know—you—er—are." She would not admit that; it sounded true, but she was sure it was not, because to lie dead like that would be the end of novelty, which was to her unthinkable.

ONCE in a new book she came across a little tale of a man who "lived" in Persia, of all heavenly places, frantically pursuing sensation. Entering one day the courtyard of his house he heard a sigh behind him, and looking round saw his own spirit apparently in the act of breathing its last. The little thing, dry and pearly white as a seed-pod of "honesty," was opening and shutting its mouth for all the world like an oyster trying to breathe. "What is it?" he said; "you don't seem well." And his spirit answered: "All right, all right! don't distress yourself—it's nothing! I've just been crowded out. That's all. Good-bye!" And with a wheeze the little thing went flat, fell onto the special blue tiles he had caused to be put down there, and lay still. He bent to pick it up, but it came off on his thumb in a smudge of grav-white powder.

The fancy was so new that it pleased her greatly, and she recommended the book to all her friends. The moral of course was purely Eastern and had no applicability whatever to Western life, where the more one did and expressed, the bigger and more healthy one's spirit grew—as, witness what she always fell to be going on within herself. But next spring she changed the blue tiles of her Turkish smoking-room, put in a birchwood floor, and made it all Russian. This she did, however, merely because one new room a year was absolutely essential to her spirit.

In her perpetual journey towards an ever-widening horizon of woman's life, she was not so foolish as to prize danger for its own sake—that was by no means her idea of adventure. That she ran some risks it would be idle to deny, but only when she had discerned the substantial advantage of a new sensation to be had out of them, not at all because they were necessary to keep her soul alive. She was, she felt, a Greek in spirit, only more no, perhaps, having in her also something of America and the West End.

How she came to be all was only known to that Age—whose daughter she undoubtedly was—an Age which ran all the time, without any foolish notion where it was running to. There was no novelty in a destination, and no sensation to be had from sitting cross-legged in a tub of sunlight—not at least after you had done it once. She had been born to dance the moon down, to ragtime. The moon, the moon! Ah! yes. It was the one thing that had as yet eluded her avidity. That, and her own soul.